Chapter 21 #3
I tear the foil off the nightstand with my teeth. An old habit — from a man who used to film this without asking. One of the only things of his I kept, because I took it back and made it mine. I roll it onto him myself. Logistics, even now. Even here.
Then I climb over him and take what I want. Sink down in one slow stroke until I’ve got all of him, and he swears at the ceiling.
“Good morning to you too,” he manages.
He lets me set it — hands open on my thighs, that infuriating openness, watching me ride him like he can’t believe his own week.
The light does unfair things to him: the body that sells the jerseys, and under it the one that doesn’t — a bruise gone yellow-green on one hip from a challenge I watched land yesterday.
I put my hand flat over it. He hisses and grins at the same time.
“You’re going to make me late for being your enemy.” His thumb finds my clit, tight circles, in time with the way I’m working him.
“Then be quiet and put your energy somewhere useful.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He laughs into my collarbone — and does exactly that, fucking up into me from below, meeting every drop of my hips, harder now, the joking gone out of his breath.
“There—” it comes out of me ragged, and I don’t recognize my own voice.
“Yeah.” Ragged. Gone. “Yeah, like that, don’t stop, you’re—”
I climbed up here to run it. Thirty seconds in I’m running nothing. Just my breath gone ragged and his name in my mouth and his hands gripping my hips hard enough to bruise.
I go over hard and fast, before I’m ready, clenching around him, and he follows a stroke behind — hips snapping up, my name ground out against his teeth, holding me down onto him through all of it.
When it’s done I’m braced over him, my hair in his face, both of us breathing like we ran the byline.
He eases out, deals with it, comes back from the bathroom with a warm cloth and cleans me up without being asked — quiet, unhurried, his thumb stroking my hip like an afterthought — and the plain domesticity of it, this enormous man tending to me with a hotel washcloth, lands somewhere I will absolutely deny later.
He wipes himself down and drops back onto the bed beside me.
“Well,” he says, lazy, grinning at the ceiling. “One way to wait out a storm.”
I should be done. I am, by every metric I keep.
But I roll up onto an elbow and look at him sprawled there, spent and easy and unguarded, and the want comes back, different this time — not the urgent kind, the greedy kind, the I-finally-have-time-and-I’m-going-to-use-it kind.
I push him onto his back. His eyebrows go up.
“Sloane—”
I don’t answer. I slide down his body, mouth on his chest, his stomach, the muscle jumping under my lips, and take him in my hand.
He’s soft, spent, and I take him into my mouth like that, slow, and feel him start to thicken against my tongue — which is its own filthy thrill, getting to feel him go from done to wanting again because of me.
I taste myself on him and clench around nothing.
He hardens fast. His breath goes ragged, his hand finding my hair — not steering, just holding on — and I take my time, because I have it, finally.
I work him with my mouth and my fist, slow and wet and unhurried, learning the catch in his breath when I take him deep, the helpless little jerk of his hips when I drag my tongue under the head.
I cup his balls and roll them and feel him go tight as a bowstring, and his thighs are shaking under my hands, and the running mouth of him has gone to single syllables — Sloane, God, your mouth, don’t — and I do not stop, because watching this careful, controlled, endlessly-giving man come apart with my name in his mouth is the most powerful I have felt in three years and I am in no rush to give it up.
I take him deep, hollow my cheeks, and he’s gone — hips coming up off the bed, his hand clenching in my hair, spilling into my mouth on a broken sound he’ll never make on a microphone. I take all of it and gentle him through it until he goes loose and boneless under me.
I crawl back up and he hauls me in, both arms, his heart slamming under my ear like he ran extra time. For one more minute the only badge in the room is skin.
“We put the colors back on in an hour,” I say.
“I know.” He tucks a piece of my hair back, a gesture so gentle after the rest of it that I have to look at the headboard. “Worth it. For the record.”
He keeps handing me my own armor back like it’s the softest thing in the world, and I keep not stopping him.
After, he drifts back under the way he does — easy, trusting — and I don’t, because I am always the one who stays awake, lying in the gray light doing arithmetic on a feeling I don’t have a column for.
Which is when the phone goes off on the nightstand. Priya. A photo.
It’s us — yesterday, the touchline, me with the clipboard down and my face doing the thing I swore it wasn’t doing while I watched him play. Candid. Unposed.
Real, in a way nothing on the run-of-sheet has ever been. And it’s already captioned, already scheduled, organic authenticity — going up 9 a.m, a moment I didn’t authorize turned into an asset while I wasn’t guarding it.
Carter’s out beside me, the grin gone slack with sleep, the realest hour of my life still warm on my skin.
And I’m going to have to be the one who wakes him up and tells him the machine got there first — that the realest thing we’ve done isn’t ours anymore, because it never was, because that was the deal, and I signed it.